


#RedInstead

by fourshoesfrank



Series: autistic dc [2]
Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: 1920s, Autistic Diana Prince, F/M, FUCK AUTISM SPEAKS, Gen, Nazi Punching, Period-Typical Ableism, Special Interests, TW Ableist Slurs, World War II, but yeet, hans asperger bashing, modern-day, seriously I hate him, the oc is dianas autistic coworker, this is gonna be canon divergence when 84 comes out, tw eugenics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 09:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: Diana thought she was different because she was sculpted from clay. Turns out she's just autistic.





	#RedInstead

**Author's Note:**

> Some autistic history for y'all: Hans Asperger was a fascist and a Nazi and he sucked. He sent disabled kids to be killed at Am Spiegelgrund because they were disabled during the height of the Nazi occupation. He didn't even 'discover' autism. A Jewish child psychiatrist named Grunya Sukhareva was the first in the medical field to observe and write about what we would classify as autism today (I believe she was the first doctor to use the term autism but don't quote me on that because I can't find an English translation of her paper at the moment). She published her first paper on this in 1925, almost twenty years before Asperger published his findings. Also: Aspergers isn't some kind of Autism Lite™. "Oh my kid has Aspergers, at least it's not autism!" Buddy, no. Literally all that means is that said child is probably verbal most of the time and they probably have shutdowns instead of meltdowns, because parents tend not to notice shutdowns occurring. Basically don't mention Hans Asperger to me (or to Diana Prince) and we'll all be happy.

The Amazons all knew about Diana's differences. They may not have understood her entirely, but every woman on Themyscira knew how to make the princess of the Amazons feel comfortable.

  
No metaphors. That was Diana’s first ‘rule.’ Figurative language didn’t make sense to her. The Amazons did their best to help Diana understand the metaphors and symbolism in the ancient texts that she had to study, and avoided using anything but the literal meaning of their words whenever they talked to her.

  
Diana appreciated it. She was fascinated by the ancient texts and art that her mother showed her, and she continued to learn about them long after her studies were complete.

  
That led to Diana’s second rule: let her talk about things. She loved sharing her observations of the various artworks on the island, and when she began learning how to fight she became immensely interested in the history of various techniques. In addition to art and fighting, she loved learning languages. The Amazons let Diana ramble on about whatever she was studying at the moment without too many complaints. The first two rules were easy to follow.

  
Diana's third rule, No Bright Lights, was somewhat harder. Themyscira had no electricity, but even so, fire could be very bright. Diana hated it. During festivals and other parties, she stayed away from the brighter fires, but just being near them still hurt her eyes. There was nothing to be done; Diana simply dealt with it and requested that the other women keep the bright lights as far from her eyes as possible. The Amazons listened.

  
Diana didn't know why she needed to have her rules in place, but she knew that they helped. She didn't know why she was different.

  
The revelation came to her while she was thinking about the story of her birth. All of the Amazons had been born from their mother's womb, and they were all different from Diana, who had been sculpted from clay. The way that she had come into the world had to be the cause of her differences. It was the only explanation that Diana could think of.

 

-

 

Steve had not known Diana's rules. She hadn't had time to teach him. She hadn't had time to tell him about the art she loved so much, or show him how much fun it was to squeeze a soft piece of leather. Steve hadn't had time to do much of anything with Diana aside from fighting alongside her. Oh, how Diana hated that fact.

  
All of the mortals' weapons were powered by bright flashes of fire. Diana detested them for two reasons: the very idea of designing something that could take hundreds of lives in a few minutes was repulsive to her, and all of these abominations violated her third rule.

  
Diana added a few words to her third rule during the war. No Bright Lights became No Bright Lights, Scratchy Clothes, or Loud Noises. Everything in the world of men seemed to be designed to break her rules.

  
Metaphors were everywhere, along with nonsensical slang terms that varied from country to country, city to city, even neighborhood to neighborhood. Diana knew countless languages, but she didn't know what to do when the word 'bird' had three different meanings in England alone. At first, Steve had 'translated' the peculiarities of mortal language for Diana, but she had begun to catch on after a few days and Steve had only clarified things if she asked him to do so.

  
Her second rule was also ignored, repeatedly. After Diana returned from Germany and began establishing a place for herself in the mortal world, the first thing she did was seek out a library. She knew there were books on many, many subjects in the mortal world, more books than any mortal human could ever dream of reading. Chief had told her about the wonderful world of literature one night around the fire while the two of them had stood watch together. He had told her of scholars who devoted their lives to discovering new information about any subject the mind could imagine, from Altaic clothing to French cuisine. Diana knew that there would be books about art that would contain information she had never even dreamt of knowing, about art, fighting techniques, and languages. She could hardly contain her excitement as she walked to the nearest library.

  
Diana read two books in three hours; one on the type of paint used in ancient Greek pottery and one on the Telugu language. She was so happy that she had joined the mortal world at a time when such vast quantities of information were readily available. She approached another woman who was perusing the section of the building full of books on art and tried to tell her all about what she had just learned. The woman gave Diana an odd look and quickly walked to the other side of the aisle.

  
This did not matter very much to Diana. After all, she didn't know the woman. The fact that Etta Candy, Diana's _friend_ , reacted in the same way mattered to her. Diana tried to tell Etta about all the wonderful discoveries that were being made in the realm of artistic history, but Etta smiled in a strange and uncomfortable way, told Diana that she had to pick up her niece from school, and left Diana's apartment without making any more conversation. Diana knew that her attempt at sharing knowledge had driven Etta away. It was a Sunday; children were not in school on Sundays. Etta had just needed an excuse to leave. Diana was hurt, but she said nothing of art the next time Etta came over for lunch and saw that Etta seemed to be having a much better time.

  
Diana learned not to tell about mortals about what she learned in library books. The mortals never cared.

  
She added a fourth rule: she should not speak to strangers unless Etta introduced them to her. This new rule wasn't broken as often as the other three.

  
No Bright Lights, Scratchy Clothes, or Loud Noises. The words of this rule began with capital letters for a reason. Each word was capitalized to emphasize the importance of the rule. Diana's third rule was probably the most important. It was definitely the most violated.

  
No Bright Lights. Diana had to walk everywhere under the glare of bright city lamps, and if she took a train, the lighting inside the train and the station nearly blinded her. She used candles inside her apartment, except when she had guests (really just Etta and a few of Etta's friends). Guests would always question why Diana used candles, and when she would tell them why, they would look at her like she was strange. Diana could bear the light of a lightbulb for a few hours at a time, in order to avoid receiving the strange looks from her guests.

  
No Scratchy Clothes. Everything seemed to be made of wool now. London was a cool, damp place, so most of its population wore woolen coats, skirts, and trousers to keep themselves warm and dry. Diana detested the feel of wool on her skin. Wool, canvas, and poorly-tanned leather automatically made a garment unwearable for her. She knew that refusing to wear wool meant that she would get cold more easily, but she also knew that wearing wool made her want to claw her own skin off so she wouldn't have to feel it any longer. This also meant that picking out blankets was difficult, because of the abundance of woolen fabrics used to make them. Diana especially hated the scratchy coverings of seats on public transportation. She flat out refused to ride buses, because they had bright headlights and their seats were scratchy and they were loud and they were full of people who made her uncomfortable.

  
No Loud Noises. London was a loud city. Diana could deal with the ever-present hum of activity in her ears, but any especially loud noises were painful. She avoided going to any places that loud people gathered in, such as sports stadiums and train stations. When her guests started to become too loud, she told them that the old man who lived next door to her often complained about the noise. He never really did, but Diana couldn't bear having the lights on and having too much noise at the same time. Etta tried to give Diana an alarm clock as a gift, but it was too loud. Diana set it on her nightstand and simply never used it. She was used to waking with the sun.

  
Diana was, for the most part, comfortable in her new life.

 

-

 

The Second World War was much more justified than the First, in Diana's opinion. She hated all wars, but this one aimed to stop people from committing murder on a scale that she could hardly envision. Diana hated the Nazis. They stood for everything that she did not.

  
Diana heard people talking about a man who had discovered a children's disease. His name was Hans Asperger, they said, and he was conducting some research on children who behaved quite a bit like Diana. She knew that it was foolish to wonder if she was like the children that man was studying, but Diana couldn't keep her thoughts from turning to Hans Asperger whenever she learned something new about art, or took a moment to steel herself before entering a crowded building.

  
Diana helped fight the war against the Nazis. With her shield, sword, and the Lasso of Truth, she was a great asset to the Allies as they fought the Nazi soldiers. She and the soldiers under her command stopped countless prison convoys from reaching the death camps, and gave the former prisoners directions to people that would help them flee Germany safely. Most of the intercepted convoys were bound for Auschwitz or Majdanek, but Diana intercepted one line of trucks that were going to Am Spiegelgrund. These trucks were full of children. Just children, no adults in sight except for the monsters driving the vehicles. Diana was infuriated. While bound by the Lasso, the officers who were driving admitted that Hans Asperger had sent the children to be euthanized so they would not pass their unclean genes to the next generation.

  
Diana did not take the officers prisoner.

 

-

 

When Diana returned from the war, she threw out all the newspaper clippings she had saved about Hans Asperger and his work. She had been foolish to think that she had the disease he had been studying. She was different because she had been sculpted from clay, and that was the only reason.

  
A mortal doctor could never hope to understand the process by which she had been given life. Why would a mortal doctor be able to explain her differences?

 

-

 

  
She moved to France in the 1980s, just in time to experience a decade of the best Eurovision entries in western Europe. Diana loved the song contest. It reminded her of a similar game that some of the musically gifted Amazons had played on Themyscira. That game had been one of Diana's favorite things to listen to.

  
Diana began working as a tour guide for the Louvre a year after she moved. A building full of art, whose entire purpose was to educate people about art and let people look at it. Diana was in heaven. The novelty of being surrounded by art every day and being _paid_ to talk about it (She was being _paid money_ just for talking about art!! Amazing!) didn't wear off for quite some time. Some of her coworkers called her _attardé_ because she squeezed her hands together when she got excited and because she refused to take the city bus in to work, but Diana didn't care. Some of the tourists thought that she was strange because she often got excited about the artwork, but Diana didn't care. She was doing what she loved, and nobody was walking away or lying that their niece needed to be picked up.

 

-

 

Diana made it all the way to the early 2000s without making the connection between _attardé_ —or the French word's English equivalent, retarded—and autistic people. It finally clicked for Diana when she saw a group of American schoolchildren who were on a class trip taunting one of their classmates, a tall, gangly boy who was flapping his hands in the air like a bird as he walked around. Diana was just passing through the room that the children were in, but she stopped to scold them.

  
A few stern words to the loud kids and a few kind words to the autistic kid seemed to mellow everything out. Well, the children stopped yelling insults at their classmate, so Diana left them to their own devices again and continued toward the cafeteria for her lunch break.

  
The children might have become more relaxed, but Diana was anything but. The boy who had been flapping his hands was most likely autistic, and autism was not characterized by low intelligence, so why had the other kids been calling the boy a retard? Diana became more puzzled by the language of the youth with every passing year. She had thought that the word was considered taboo in English-speaking countries; perhaps she was wrong.

  
Diana was lying in bed that night when it hit her. She understood. It had finally clicked in her brain. Mortals were often of the mind that anyone who thought differently than the majority of people must have been bad at thinking, and therefore...retarded. Diana didn't agree with the reasoning there, but she thought that it was the most likely explanation. It also explained why people called her _attardé_ when they thought she couldn't hear them: she thought differently from the mortals because she had been sculpted from clay instead of born as they had been. It made perfect sense.

 

-

 

Diana didn't know exactly what was violating her third rule, but her brain was not _right_. She was in her apartment, squeezing her hands together and shifting her weight from one foot to the other, back and forth, back and forth, and her brain was being _wrong_. All the lights were turned off, all the candles were out, Diana's thick headphones were securely over her ears, and she was wearing pajamas made of fabric so soft she wouldn't have believed it would ever exist if she'd heard of it while she lived in London. She had modified her environment to fit her third rule, and there was no one else around to break the first two, so why didn't she feel good?

  
The entire day had been bad. It was the first day of April, and apparently the Louvre was participating in the 'Autism Awareness' aspect of that particular month. The Autism Speaks brochures and overabundance of blue ribbons had made Diana uneasy from the moment she walked in, and she'd been on edge all day long. The approach that Autism Speaks seemed to be taking rubbed Diana the wrong way (metaphor!) for more than one reason. First, they referred to autism like it was a disease, which was the same attitude that Hans Asperger had held, and Diana remembered the truck full of disabled children that had been sent to their deaths by that man all too well. Secondly, the brochures were aimed entirely at the non-autistic families of the people that they claimed to be raising awareness for. Diana didn't like it.

  
She called in sick the next day. Her boss told her that was fine, good, as long as Diana remembered to wear blue when she came in. Diana hung up the phone with a huff she hoped her boss couldn't hear.

  
After half an hour of googling information about Autism Speaks, Diana could confidently say that she would lay waste to their headquarters without hesitation, if such a thing were allowed. She knew that she would have to settle for the countermovement that her google searches had revealed, Red Instead. Diana just so happened to love wearing the color red. She would certainly stand out the next day, back at work. A bright red speck in a sea of blue.

 

-

 

She wore red for the next week and a half before anyone commented on it. A cashier in the gift shop named Lavern approached her in the break room and asked if Diana was showing support for Red Instead. Diana told them that she was.

  
Lavern nodded. "Are you autistic, Diana?" they asked.

  
Diana opened her mouth to answer _non_ , but she snapped it shut almost immediately. In addition to googling how horrible Autism Speaks was, Diana had also devoted some of her 'sick day' to researching what autism looked like in adult women. Many of the symptoms, or traits, fit Diana perfectly. She also knew that Arthur Curry, who was only half mortal, was autistic, so being a mortal was not a requirement. Diana began to nod, but she hesitated again, this time because she had read that many people did not think a person was autistic unless said person had the official word of a doctor to prove it. Diana had studied medicine on Themyscira; mental as well as physical. She thought that she was at least a little qualified to make a statement about her own mind.

  
" _Oui_ , I am."

**Author's Note:**

> hey yall know feedback.......it's sexy........comments really pave my highway


End file.
